^rL9, 
35 



AN ADDRESS 
AT LELAND STANFORD, JR., UNIVERSITY 



UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 
IN AMERICA 



BY 

WHITE LAW RE ID 




UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 
IN AMERICA 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED 

AT LELAND STANFORD, JR., UNIVERSITY, 

APRIL 19, 1901 



BY 

WHITELAW REID 



PRINTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY 

NEW YORK 

1901 






y 







KlW YORK PUBL. LIBR. 
IN EXCHANGE. 



UNIYERSITY TENDENCIES 

AN ADDRESS AT LELAND STANFOED, JR., UNIVERSITY 



[A number of passages (including the opening paragraph), which were 
omitted in the delivery for the sake of brevity, have been here restored.] 



In the remote East, far from the centres of exact information, 
there has been heard now and again a rumor that, somehow, the 
proper freedom of academic discussion here in Stanford is in 
peril. How much academic freedom the breezy West requires I 
do not quite know ; but of a few things about it I am sure. One 
is that academic freedom may be needed for the university itself, 
as well as for the professors it commissions. Another is that 
there is a possibility of having too much demagogic license even 
among teachers ; and that universities and the unimportant 
people who conduct them, and the other unimportant people 
who support them, still have some rights which " cranks " are 
bound to respect. And another thing I feel sure of is that 
the present occasion would seem to indicate at least as much 
academic freedom in the burning discussions of the hour as most 
reasonable people would look for. Your honored President is 
the intellectual head of what has been called anti-imperialism 
in this country, as well as among its most serious, disinterested 
and courageous champions ; while my opposition, in my way 
and according to my opportunities, to about everything he has 
taught on this subject has been perfectly well known to him. 
Nevertheless, he asked me here to speak to you to-day on the 
Philippine question, and to say whatever I pleased on the sub- 
ject, proffering me the widest hospitality of the Stanford plat- 
form. He did exactly the same thing when the contest was far 
sharper and the issue apparently far more in doubt, a year ago. 
Now, perhaps, I am not sufficiently eager to appreciate this op- 



4 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

portunity for vindicating academic freedom at Stanford, or alive 
to the need of it. In fact, freedom of speech anywhere is not 
exactly the thing of whose safety at present this country needs, 
as it seems to me, to be most apprehensive. At any rate I do 
not think it desirable to take your President at his word and 
"carry the war into Africa." I propose, with your leave, to 
adopt his alternative suggestion and address you on some ten- 
dencies of American universities. 

' The century just closed is commonly said to have made greater 
progress for the human race than all that preceded it since the 
dawn of the Christian era. However great, it was a progress 
made possible by the diffusion of learning ; it was very largely 
stimulated by American colleges and universities, and was in 
nothing more remarkable or more valuable than in the progress 
of these colleges and universities themselves. Their growth in 
influence, the change in their character, resources and scope 
since the Civil War, and especially in the last twenty years, 
have been almost revolutionary. 

I recall a conversation with Professor Huxley, with which I 
was honored in my younger days. To my question what, on the 
whole, he thought the greatest achievement of the century, even 
then nearly four fifths passed, he replied, not as I had been ex- 
pecting, — the telegraph, or the telephone, or the ocean cable, or 
steam navigation, or the photograph, or Bessemer steel. All 
these he brushed aside, in order to select as the greatest and 
most beneficent discovery of the nineteenth century, — antiseptic 
surgery ! Surely in a like spirit we can hold as secondary the 
wonderful strides America has made in subduing a continent, 
in spreading out over the islands of the sea, in gaining and 
maintaining independence, and even in abolishing slavery; while 
we find its noblest achievement in building up from ocean to 
ocean a gigantic system, free practically to the poorest as well 
as to the richest child of the Republic, under which any man can 
learn anything. Not in the armies that have so heroically borne 
our flag, not in the navies whose eight-inch guns, fired on the 
other side of the globe, lately shattered an ancient monarchy at 
ten thousand miles range ; not in the inventions that amaze, nor 
in the growth that bewilders, nor even in the general diffusion 
of comfort that beggars the world for parallels, is your greatest 
glory to be found. Rather it is in the mind that has been en- 
lightened, in the life that has been shaped and directed — in a 
word, it is in the kind of man that America rears. 



IN AMERICA 5 

Some of us remember the spot where we stand as an old Span- 
ish ranch, and then as the race-track where experiments were 
in progress in photographing the horse in motion. All the 
world looks to it now. This vast and stately stone quadrangle 
that has risen from the old ranch, with its long-drawn colon- 
nades, embowered in tropical foliage, and this other, still rising, 
without and around it, longer and more stately, lifting its arches 
to a sky as clear and a sun as fervid as those of Italy, afford a 
spacious and splendid sanctuary for learning, on the remote 
Pacific coast, such as the Greek philosophers never dreamed of, 
even when Athens was greatest or their authority at its height. 
We stand too near to it to realize its magnitude. It is, in fact, 
perhaps the greatest, certainly the most beneficent monument 
of parental grief ever reared in the history of civilization, — a 
thirty- or forty-million investment for teaching youth, from 
one man and his wife, in memory of a pale, winsome, lonely 
little lad of sixteen. I can see him still, as he mingled wistfully 
with younger children, in the merry companionship denied him 
in his own home, the night before he sailed away on the voyage 
from which he never came back — a pathetic figure that was to 
breathe out his young life in the mercifully short embrace of 
the Roman fever. The grief-stricken parents knew, with an in- 
stinct we now recognize as truly American, that they could do 
nothing else so good with the princely inheritance that would 
have been his as to make it a luminary that should steadily flood 
with the radiance of its enlightenment the youth of his native 
land. 

If this example may not be equalled, it has at least been nobly 
anticipated and emulated all over the Union. In government 
aid. State or National, for education, and in private gifts for 
education, the world has never seen wealth lavished as it has 
been on this continent during the century just closed, and es- 
pecially during its last twenty-five years. What is to come of 
it all? We may no doubt claim now the widest diffusion of 
learning in the world ; but how can we best entitle ourselves to 
claim also the highest and best learning of the world ? 

Before essaying to answer that question, we may find it profit- 
able to pause for a moment on some current complaints about 
what we have. 

One is that education is too cheap and open to everybody ; 
and that in consequence, largely at the public expense, whole 
classes in the community are educated out of fitness for any- 
1a 



6 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

thing that, with their limitatious of intellect or character or 
environment, they are capable of doing. You spoil a good day 
laborer, it is said, or a promising young farmer or mechanic, to 
make an unsuccessful shopkeeper or a worthless lawyer. But 
this is only another way of saying that the man has missed his 
vocation, and you have to look back of the schools to find the 
cause for that. The world is full of misfits, among the unedu- 
cated as well as the educated. Educating a man — if it be a 
real education and not a smattering you give him — does not 
intellectually unfit him for finding what he can do. He may 
develop a distaste for it, but that is the fault not of the educa- 
tion but of the character, inherited and developed by environ- 
ment, that was brought to be educated. Other things being 
equal, an educated man is far better qualified than an unedu- 
cated one to find out what he is fit for and to keep at it. "Know 
thyself " is one of the first maxims of philosophy ; and to help 
their students to that knowledge one of the highest and most 
sacred duties of the college. The man that is really educated 
has learned his limitations, and found out at least what he is 
not fit for. It is the half-educated person, good-naturedly car- 
ried forward in classes and studies from which his intellectual 
or other limitations under discriminating and honest teaching 
would have excluded him, that is unfitted by his so-called edu- 
cation for what he can do, and not fitted for anything else. To 
avoid turning a lad's head by letting him think he has mastered 
a study " well enough " when he has been found incapable of 
grasping it at all, is as much the duty of the conscientious edu- 
cator as to teach him what he is capable of learning. When he 
is relentlessly turned back from the preparatory studies that 
are beyond him, there is the less danger of his being drawn 
from the productive work he should remain at, to the profession 
he is unfit for. No doubt, in the interest of the state and the 
community, the true rule for the secondary schools as well as 
the colleges — if the ideal could be attained — would be to make 
it easy for every youth to get all the education his capacity 
will warrant and his circumstances permit, and difficult for 
him to try for any more. 

Another current complaint is that many of these colleges are 
little beyond pretentious high-schools; that they degrade de- 
grees by giving them to unfit graduates ; degrade learning by 
lowering its standards, and degrade men by making them char- 
latans while calling them and making them think themselves 
scholars. There is an element of justice here, as there is apt to 



IN AMERICA 7 

be in wide-spread complaints of almost any sort. But it is not 
true that a community is worse off for having feeble colleges ; 
though certainly it would always be better off if it had better 
ones. In various educational publications — and among others in 
one sent under the authority of the State of New York to repre- 
sent the condition of our education in the World's Fair at 
Paris— there is free censure of the State of Ohio for dissipating 
on thirty-six small colleges energies which might make one or 
two great ones. But does not this miss the real objection to the 
condition in Ohio ? If there is a valid objection at all, it must 
be less that the colleges are not large, than that they are not 
good. 

A third complaint, then, and a just one, is that an undignified 
and unworthy competition for students among some weak col- 
leges and universities has lowered courses of study, cheapened 
degrees, deceived students and generally degraded education. 
The aim has been to see how soon they could turn students out, 
not how much they could teach them. Thus the vulgar ambi- 
tion to use the numbers admitted and the fees received as a test 
and advertisement of success has led to the spectacle of some 
schools clamorously announcing, almost in the shrill fashion 
after which the street merchant vends his wares, that you can 
get as much here, owing to our superior process of cramming, 
in two years as you can get at the shop across the way in 
three,— and so have just a year saved in your lifetime in 
which you can be busy making money. In other schools the 
very source is poisoned by the admission of students without 
adequate preparation, on the plea that the superior facilities in 
the college will make up for any deficiencies in the preparatory 
work. One way or the other, swarms of struggling institutions 
which look first to numbers and fees, and only afterwards to 
thoroughness and adequate scope, do bring discredit upon edu- 
cation, do give many young people a distaste for any work they 
are fit for in the world, do draw to the cities shoals of people 
who would live better and stand higher in the country, and do 
crowd the professions with worthless lawyers, physicians and 
clergymen who ought to be at the plough. But it is the sham, 
not tiie education that does the harm ; and that sham should be 
hunted down relentlessly, whether found in the colleges them- 
selves, or in the medical or other professional schools of the 
universities. 

There is a just complaint, too, against institutions of a better 
class for the low and book-keeping spirit in which matters of 



8 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

learning are sometimes treated. Thus this question is occasion- 
ally made the vital one, not what has he learned? but how 
many hours has he given to the study? and above all is there 
a system of educational hocus-pocus, a plan for the student to 
hoist himself to the educational ceiling by a tug at his educa- 
tional boot-straps, through the ingenious process of counting 
these same hours twice — once for the college and once for the 
professional training that is to follow ! Grave, grown men, who 
imagine themselves engaged in promoting advanced learning, 
have been found to write out the details for this educational 
sleight-of-hand, and insinuatingly explain to ingenuous youth 
how the time devoted to this or that particular study may be 
contrived, like Box and Cox's bedroom, or like Goldsmith's fur- 
niture, a double debt to pay, a chest of drawers in college and 
a bed of down in the Law School ! To make hours of study 
rather than maturity of mind and acquirement the preliminary 
for professional courses, and then to select the studies so that 
these hours can be counted first on the preliminary and again 
on the professional work, is the sort of shifty thrift that in less 
ideal realms is apt to bring a man to the constable. 

Nevertheless, after its bad fashion, this practice does meet 
another popular complaint. If a boy is to work his way in life, 
parents often say, he cannot spare so much time before getting 
at it. The young man kept in college till twenty-two, and in 
professional studies three or four years more, starts at twenty- 
five or twenty-six, it is complained, in a competition that can 
only be disastrous, with the boy who set up for himself at 
eighteen. Now if the end of educating a man is only to get him 
ready to keep a shop, or run a factory or an iron-mill, or to go 
into Wall Street, or in some way merely to make money, I am 
not much inclined to dispute that contention. At least it is 
difficult to match from among college or university graduates 
such an array of non-collegiate names, representing the greatest 
present business success, as will readily occur to every one. 
The men who consolidated the Astor fortune came, it is true, 
from Heidelberg, but the man who founded it did not. The 
founders of the Vanderbilt, the Morgan, the Moses Taylor, the 
Goelet, the Mackay, the Gould, or the Cooper fortunes came 
from no college at home or abroad. Take the most conspicuous 
business successes, confessedly won and maintained by high 
ability, now or recently at the front in New York. C. P. Hunt- 
ington, for example, was emancipated from schools of any kind 
long before he was eighteen. So were John and William Rocke- 



IN AMERICA 9 

feller, and so — not to weary yon with mere enumeration — so was 
Andrew Carnegie. The latter even goes so far as to hold college 
training a positive disqualification for business. " The graduate 
has not the slightest chance," he says, " as against the boy who 
swept the office." 

A distinguished ex-President of the United States who has 
recently given this subject some consideration, remarks acutely 
enough that the methods in great enterprises have so changed 
of late as to demand a higher grade of education, and that the 
new competition easily distances the self-made man who starts 
young without equal equipment for the race. In the field par- 
ticularly of applied science and invention the ex-President has 
much reason already for his belief; and the tendencies of an 
age in which the engineer, the chemist, and the electrician 
threaten to be kings are sure to do a great deal more to confirm 
it. But the fact remains that, within the general knowledge, 
the very greatest business successes of the last quarter of a cen- 
tury, the greatest quite up to this present moment, have been 
more generally won by men who were at work instead of in 
college before twenty. 

What then ? Must men who expect to follow business careers 
abandon the joy and comfort of a liberal education ? There are 
several answers. One is the argumentum ad hominem. The 
successful self-made man scarcely ever favors that course him- 
self, when it comes to the education of his own sons. Another 
is that there are specialized courses provided by all the leading 
colleges now, which partly meet the wants of those who think 
they must begin life by seventeen or eighteen. 

But, more conclusive than either, there are better things to 
aim at than mere money-making, — at least for those not pressed 
by an inexorable necessity, — higher joys than that of simple 
business success. If there are many who must forego these for 
the sake of beginning life prematurely, — sweeping out the shop, 
as Mr. Carnegie puts it, in the hope of coming some day to own 
the shop, — that is no reason why the institutions of higher 
learning should not develop along the best lines for the sake of 
the steadily increasing number in this prosperous land who can 
take time for the best things. This is no longer a young, poor 
people on a wild, unexplored continent, struggling desperately 
with hard circumstances to make a beginning. It is a great 
nation, rich with the unprecedented progress and accumulated 
prosperity of a hundred years. The average man no longer 
needs, like the sons of the pioneers, to sacrifice the highest 

iB 



10 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

things of which he is capable for the sake of getting into the 
shop early, so as not to be outstripped in the mere race for a 
living. Success in American life hereafter will be measured 
with more characters than merely the dollar-mark; and Ameri- 
can education must be shaped in the future to fit the man, 
rather than merely his business. Many, no doubt, who will 
hold deservedly high places in the twentieth century must be 
at work by eighteen or earlier ; but that is a reason for giving 
them such an education as they need and can assimilate, not 
for lowering the college standard, to the detriment of all the 
rest, in order to give them the deceptive decoration of a 
diploma thus depreciated and undeserved. 

Akin to this tendency to cheapen the lower degrees for the 
sake of students who lack the time to earn them is another 
error, barely showing itself, in quarters more advanced, of which 
whispers begin to be heard. This is the fault of encouraging 
post-graduate study for the higher learning, less for its own 
sake than for the degree. Thus one reads in a recent and im- 
portant educational authority about the respective advantages 
of divers ways and means of " studying for the Doctorate, as the 
goal to which the graduate student presses on." It is a high 
ambition, no doubt. And yet there have been educational 
authorities with a loftier view of their mission, who sought to 
lead their students to move on a higher plane and strive for a 
worthier goal. If students are encouraged to select what ad- 
vanced learning they are to seek, and to shape the course of 
study they adopt in any measure with reference simply to its 
degree-producing powers, — if they do not seek it for itself and 
choose the course purely because it is the most helpful to 
the end, then our post-graduate courses must have less value 
and our degrees must convey less distinction. The man who 
serves his imperilled countrymen in an alarming crisis by a 
supreme act of devotion may well prize the Victoria Cross with 
which his proud and grateful country distinguishes him. But 
if he laid his course, not as a patriot to do his duty to his im- 
perilled countrymen, but merely as an adventurer, feeling the 
need of decoration, to hunt for the quickest and easiest oppor- 
tunity to get it, the cross wears another aspect if won, and 
carries an altogether different value. 

There are objectors, too, who question the advantage of the 
present overwhelming tendency, especially at the West, towards 
collegiate and university co-education. Certainly in no part of 
the educational field has greater progress been made than in the 



IN AMERICA 11 

facilities for the education of women ; and shrivelled must be 
the soul that would have it otherwise. Vassar, Smith, Welles- 
ley, Bryn Mawr, have long marked a higher standard than sim- 
ilar schools for women in other lands ; and now colleges abroad, 
like Girton and Newnham, enjoying high university affiliations, 
are at last finding their worthy counterparts here in Radcliffe 
and Barnard and others. It is an inspiring progress, and even 
if it may have been carried in some institutions to an illogical 
development, the error, if error there be, will cure itself. But 
certainly it must be admitted that the Western trend to direct 
co-education in colleges and universities is plainly at variance 
with another development we have all regarded as characteris- 
tic of progress towards the higher education,— the process of 
differentiation and specialization. Grant at once, as a thing 
nobody in this age dreams of questioning, the right of woman, 
quite as clear as the right of man, to learn everything. But the 
fact remains that the great majority of women seeking an ad- 
vanced education will probably in time come to do the same 
thing the men do,— specialize it with reference to the life they 
are going to lead ; and the girl graduate from one of the great 
co-educational universities is not, as a rule, going to lead the 
same life as the bachelor of science or the bachelor of elec- 
trical engineering. If the highest progress be in differentiation 
and specialization of effort, then women are entitled to that 
progress as well as men ; and university co-education, though, 
perhaps, as yet the most economical, is manifestly not the best 
way of supplying it. On the disadvantages that some think 
they find in throwing the two sexes into the intimacy of a com- 
mon college life at the most impressionable period, when their 
thoughts ought to be on their books and are so easily kindled 
instead into dreams of love and matrimony, I do not imagine 
it profitable to dwell. The parents who send their sons and 
daughters to co-educational institutions know what they are 
doing. One can only say about the system they are likely to 
select, what Mr. Lincoln said about the book : " If you like this 
kind of a book, then I reckon this is just about the book you 
would like." 

An acute English observer, Mr. Bryce, remarks that German 
universities are popular, but not free ; English universities free, 
but not popular ; and American universities both popular and 
free. Let us hope that these characteristics in our system may 
be preserved in their purity. Long may we continue to have 



12 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

OTir universities popular in the sense that they are open on 
equal terms to every rank and condition of life — that they have 
no unwritten laws restricting them to the sons of gentlemen of 
birth or distinction, and making them uncomfortable for any- 
body else. Long may they remain free, in the sense that the 
instruction is limited only by the desire to seek and to teach the 
truth. But the popularity will be harmful if it degenerates into 
a vulgar catering for numbers by throwing down the bars of 
admission which time and experience have sanctioned ; and the 
liberty will be disastrous if it degenerates into license, whether 
for the students in their conduct, or for the professors in their 
teaching. The freedom for a student which absolves him from 
the obligations of a gentleman is no better and no worse than 
the freedom for a professor which absolves him from the duties 
of a patriot, and converts his relations to his country into gen- 
eral railings against its present and its past policy, rather than 
the exercise of an influence, justly belonging to the highly edu- 
cated and highly placed, upon the country's future. It is a 
misfortune for the colleges, and no less for the country, when 
the trusted instructors are out of sympathy with its history, 
with its development, and with the men who made the one and 
are guiding the other. 

It was suggested a few minutes ago that the splendid gifts of 
learning which illuminate and ennoble our history, and in an 
unprecedented degree our recent history, entitle us to expect 
for our country the highest and best learning of the world. But 
what is the highest and best 1 Or, if that question be too ab- 
stract for a conclusive answer, what is the highest and best for 
this country! What sort of education does a republic most 
need in the days of its overwhelming success and unparalleled 
prosperity ? Perhaps a solution may be easier if we state the 
problem differently. What defects of human character does 
a republic tend to develop, that the higher education should 
correct ? 

Well, our critics, foreign and domestic, are free-spoken enough 
to leave us little difficulty in finding answers to that. We are 
conceited beyond endurance. We brag like Bombastes. We 
are slow to believe that other people can teach us anything. 
We have the provincial idea that because we are conspicuously 
ahead in some things we are ahead in everything. We reach 
conclusions without seeing a subject on all sides, and are then 
intolerant of diversity of opinion. We value big things simply 
because of their bigness. We live in a whirl of money-making. 



IN AMEEICA 13 

or amusement, or excitement of some kind ; we rarely take time 
to think of other things, and, because we are too busy for it our- 
selves, we let the newspapers make up our minds for us. 
When acting collectively we are liable to go off at half cock, 
and are swept by sudden waves of popular excitement like the 
French. We do so many things in a hurry that often we fail to 
do some of them thoroughly. We come to think that pretty well 
is good enough ; that veneer is better than the solid mahogany, 
looking just as well and costing far less ; that a chromo is as 
good as the oil-painting from which a casual glance does not 
distinguish it ; that a plaster cast of the Venus of Milo is, " for 
practical purposes," about as good as the broken and discolored 
old marble in the Louvre ; that a machine-made American carpet 
is as good as the rug from the looms of India ; a pot-metal vase 
for the garden as good as one of bronze or marble; an iron 
cornice, painted stone-color, as good as one of the carved stone; 
always the thing that has been done by wholesale by machinery, 
" more in the prevailing style," and just as good for practical 
people as the thing patiently wrought in every line to individual 
beauty by a trained and beauty-loving intelligence. 

Do not these superficial defects go deeper? Has there not 
been a constant tendency, developed by democratic institutions 
thus far everywhere, in ancient times as well as our own, to 
level down ; sometimes to pare off individualism in character or 
action ; often to resent and pull down superiority, to encourage 
mediocrity, and to try to believe, if not to avow, as a necessary 
article of true democratic faith, that mediocrity is equal to the 
best and just as good ? Naturally this tendency, which a repub- 
lic generally seems to develop, will lead to treating men not as 
individuals, but in great masses. It thus invades the field of 
education and converts the noblest work confided to man — the 
moulding, one might almost say the very creation of individual 
character — into high-pressure arrangements for the production 
of scholars by wholesale ; into schemes to shape and manufacture 
characters and lives like wa,tches or steam-engines by machinery. 

Should the best American education tend to control this bias 
of repuljlican institutions or be controlled by it ? If the latter, 
then let us make our colleges and universities bigger and 
bigger; crowd more scores and hundreds of eager, immature 
individual human units into each class, and deal with them in 
gross ; run our institutions as one or two (for better reasons, no 
doubt) are already run, on full time or overtime, like a factory, 
summer and winter, spring and autumn ; show their students 



14 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

how to make one hour count for two ; veneer and varnish them 
as quickly as possible ; and let each educational factory be rated 
by the rapidity of its methods and the quantity of its output. 
But if the best education for a republic should tend to counter- 
act the defects it develops, and to elevate and strengthen it for 
a long and successful life, is it not clear that we shall do better 
with less wholesale processes, that our effort must be to exert 
individual influence upon the individual youth to be trained 
with reference to his individual wants, and that if changes are 
to occur, it is better colleges we want instead of bigger ones ? 

Consider, if you are willing to pause long enough, the extent 
to which we have gone in banishing the parent or teacher from 
his old close and intimate influence with the individual boy. 
The most fashionable educational tendency of the day, particu- 
larly in our large cities, eliminates family influence from the 
school period almost at the outset by abandoning our excellent 
secondary schools, or even the local private schools, in either of 
which that influence might still be maintained. The boy must 
not be made a mollycoddle. He must not be kept tied to 
his mother's apron strings. He must learn to rough it with 
other boys, and dig his strenuous way through the rough and 
tumble of a distant boarding-school without being able to run 
always to sympathizing parents in trouble or in trivial illness. 
That, we are told, is the only way to make a man of him. He 
must not be guarded from evil. To do that long is impossible ; 
therefore take him away from his family life, expose him early 
to contamination, and let him learn to conquer it, if he can, by 
fighting his battle alone. And so the boy must be thrown 
more with other boys than with parents or teachers from the 
outset, and must be sent at a tender age to St. Paul's or St. 
Mark's or Groton or Lawrenceville, or the Pacific coast equiva- 
lents, for a four or six years' stay. Then the parents, who have 
scarcely seen him save at vacations, part with him again, and he 
enters one of the big colleges. Here he finds himself in a class 
of several hundred freshmen, with little possibility for more 
than a speaking acquaintance with the professors in the class- 
room, and less likelihood of much close contact with them out- 
side. The individual and social substitutes for family influence 
that make up the refined life of the English university are 
largely lacking in the American system, and the young men in 
these big colleges are still necessarily dealt with in the mass, 
and given their education by wholesale. 



IN AMERICA ' 15 

Consider next how the intense practicality of our education 
hitherto — the insistent demand for something from the col- 
leges that would let the student think himself liberally educated, 
and yet let him begin life early — has drawn us away from the 
highest aims. Let us revert again to the inquiry, What sort of 
an education does a republic most need for its most favored 
citizens in the days of its bewildering success and prosperity ? 
Do not the very quality of its defects and the nature of its dan- 
gers compel the answer that what the Republic thus needs is 
not merely or mostly knowledge? No doubt it must always 
strive for an education that will place the experience of the 
world in all ages at its service. But beyond and far above 
that must be its development of the disposition for reflection, 
the power to consider dispassionately, the capacity to reason 
accurately, and then to reach just judgments on these acquired 
facts. One of the easiest tasks in the world is to learn things. 
The child does it almost by instinct. One of the hardest tasks 
in the world is to think about things exactly, judiciously, cor- 
rectly ; to estimate, to weigh, to give the proper value to each, 
to reach sound conclusions, — in a word, to make the know- 
ledge of things of the most value for the conduct of life. When 
the crude knowledge has thus been assimilated by the reflective 
mind, as the ruminating animal assimilates the crude food for 
the physical frame, there has come a new quality to the stu- 
dent. Out of the things he has learned and the philosophy 
that has taught him their meanings and relations have come 
the faculty of seeing straight and of thinking straight, and from 
those follow, as certainly as the needle follows the pole, the 
crowning gift of living straight. Knowledge as the basis there 
must be : knowledge of what the world has done and is doing, 
in civics, in economics, in everything relating to the history or 
the science of government; knowledge of man, — the being to 
be governed, — of the motives that influence his conduct, the cir- 
cumstances that change his purpose, what his mind is and how 
it works ; knowledge of the languages he works with, of the 
literature that inspires him and the laws that govern him; 
knowledge of the ideas he cherishes, the faith he holds, the 
customs and prejudices that hold him. But all these are as 
nothing, and may even be worse, without the reflection, the rea- 
soning, the judgment that transmute them into charts for our 
guidance and safeguards against our dangers. First, then, the 
Republic, where every citizen is a ruler, needs knowledge, of 
course, for its citizens; but next and more it needs the judg- 



16 UNIVEESITY TENDENCIES 

ment which can vitalize knowledge; and then the character, 
born of the right principles coming from the two, which fructi- 
fies both and becomes the most precious possession of the state. 
In thus noting the need of more direct personal contact and 
individual influence between teacher and taught, or in noting 
the need of strengthening the college course where it has been 
weakened by changes making it more attractive to practical 
people who are in a hurry to begin life, there is not the slightest 
intention to disparage or undervalue the undeniable merits of 
what we have. Surely, enough has been said already to show 
an adequate appreciation of our progress under the present sys- 
tem and the marvels it has wrought. But it is fair, I think, to 
say, in a general way, and with admission in advance of the 
thousands of exceptions, that hitherto our education in this 
country has been to make a living. The country is old enough 
and prosperous enough now to warrant us in expecting that 
henceforth it will be more an education to make a life. I would 
plead, then, for a system that would put the most into one's 
life, rather than for that which enables one quickest to begin 
life and earn a living. That, too, has its place, supremely im- 
portant in the past, highly important still and always. But let 
us not deceive ourselves as to proportions and values. It is 
not the highest. To make a hfe, full, rounded, with balanced 
character and serenity of judgment, with trained capacities 
for the highest work, the highest appreciation, the fullest and 
purest enjoyment, — that is a greater thing than to make a 
living ! 

Unless these observations have wholly missed their purpose, 
they must now have led your minds at least to consider, if not 
to accept, two propositions which seem to me to sum up the 
next advances for American colleges and universities. They 
need now to give more individual attention to the individual 
pupil, and they need to lead him on paths to the best learning 
for the best life, rather than merely for the quickest business or 
professional success. The first proposition does not point to 
big colleges ; and the second does not point to university devel- 
opment exclusively on the lines thus far most in favor. Bigger 
colleges must mean less individual influence on the eager, im- 
mature mind ; the specialization most in favor now in our uni- 
versities is that which leads to ways to make a living, and while 
no one would want less of that, the highest education must give 
more of something else. 



IN AMERICA 17 

We started in America with the English idea of a college. 
Later we grew into the German idea of a university. We 
changed the English college, after the American fashion, by 
making it bigger and, as we thought, more practical. Then we 
rejected the English idea of a university, partly because the 
"shrieks of locality," as some politicians once expressed it, made 
such a grouping of colleges at one spot difficult, if not impossi- 
ble ; but still more because the English idea chiefly encouraged 
what might be called pure learning, as distinguished from the 
professional and specialized teaching which was a more marked 
characteristic of the German university. The outcome is, first, 
colleges sometimes as big as half a dozen English ones, and then 
certain professional, scientific and technical schools added, and 
the whole called a university. But this has been attended by 
material changes in the course of the college intended to facili- 
tate entrance to, and perhaps quicken passage through, the uni- 
versity. It all makes, beyond question, an admirable outcome 
for the practical people that needed and organized it. But it is 
not the best outcome now for a people who have outgrown their 
early needs. 

When the next Stanford has another forty millions or more 
to expend in an effort to give his country an institution of learn- 
ing worthy of its glorious present and its bewildering future, 
why not begin with the idea of an eminent church dignitary of 
the West, that a university, primarily considered, is less a school 
than an atmosphere ? Let him create the atmosphere by group- 
ing and organizing his colleges in close and friendly emulation, 
as at Oxford or Cambridge. Then let him see to it that the 
entrance requirements admit only students capable of using the 
opportunities he offers, and that the colleges prescribe only 
those courses of study which the best experience of the world 
has found to furnish the best basis for any profession, or for 
further intellectual training in any direction. When he has thus 
secured them the best start, let him open to the graduates of 
these colleges a real university, comprising the best features of 
both the English and the German type, with the splendid en- 
couragement Oxford and Cambridge offer for the further prose- 
cution of learning for its own sake, and with all the professional, 
scientific, technological and other schools and courses we have 
already adapted from German models and improved upon from 
our own experience. 

Suppose some one had the power to plant Dartmouth and 
Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin and Brown and Smith in one 



18 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

neighborhood, retaining for each its separate organization, its 
individual merits and inspiring history, and to build on them 
the University of New England. Who does not perceive that 
here would be an atmosphere of learning, an emulation and 
inspiration for the best work, an authority, a dignity, a 
promise and potency such as the New World has never yet 
seen in the educational field 1 Of course it is wildly impossible. 
But in dealing with younger institutions, or in establishing 
new ones with the colossal pecuniary power some educational 
benefactors now wield, such a system could be begun. In that 
direction might be found a realization of the higher aims that 
have been indicated. In such a group of colleges, none need 
be so overgrown as to make individual contact between the 
pupil and the professor impossible; or if one is, a smaller 
one, beside it, will have the same atmosphere and the same 
university control and advantages. None need dilute its 
course by "electives" which belong in the university, or lower 
its course to accommodate the haste of those who must begin 
life early. From such a group of colleges the true university 
would rise naturally, broad-based and spreading at will in every 
direction to which the trained mind, now competent to choose 
for itself, would seek to extend its studies. But the more stimu- 
lating atmosphere and the more strictly collegiate training 
would alike insure the direction of larger numbers to the fields 
of languages, history, philosophy, mathematics and pure science, 
which give the training more needful and more useful for a re- 
public than anywhere else, and which properly rank first in an 
institution of the highest learning that aims to cover all the great 
departments of intellectual life. The opportunity for differen- 
tiation and specialization in educational effort would be great- 
er than ever, but it would be put where it belongs, not with 
the youth in his plastic, uncertain, formative period, but with 
the trained young man, competent to select and eager to pursue. 
Thus when the graduate passed from the college, whether he 
devoted himself chiefly to the highest learning or sought at once 
an education in applied science or in a profession, he would, at 
any rate, carry into the university a mind fit for the work it 
demands. To borrow the happy illustration of President Stry- 
ker of Hamilton, the college would have made the intellectual 
iron that came to it into steel; and therefore the university 
would not be wasting its time in trying to put a fine edge upon 
pot-metal. 

Perhaps it is a fanciful idea that we shall ever group colleges 
anywhere in a great university in America, as circumstances 



IN AMERICA 19 

that can never be reproduced did group them, six or seven cen- 
turies ago, on the banks of the Cam and the Isis. We have 
gone far, with good results, on another road. The old universi- 
ties sprang from a desire for a wider learning than the schools 
of the cathedrals and monks would furnish. So the American 
university of to-day sprang from a need for a wider and more 
practical learning than those English and Continental models 
fm'nished ; and we can no more afford to lose this widening and 
extension than we can afford to go back to the schools of the 
cathedrals. But the universities that sprang up in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries held on to the best in the schools 
they replaced. Now that we have the leisure and the oppor- 
tunities which great growth and great prosperity confer, it 
should be our instinct to hold on to the best in the university 
system which we replaced with our own a hundred years ago. 
Whether the exact organization can be reproduced or not, the 
essentials are surely within reach. 

First, the university atmosphere, which can be attained only 
by the flocking of teachers and pupils to a great educational 
centre. 

Secondly, the individual influence of the teacher upon the 
pupil, especially throughout the collegiate course, which can 
best be attained in colleges of moderate size, under the univer- 
sity, by methods of instruction less formal and more vitalizing 
to the immature mind than merely by lectures and written ex- 
aminations, and by the more intimate association, in commons 
and elsewhere, between professors and students. 

Thirdly, the old college course as the best training for the 
new university work, — the humanities, to recur to the finely 
descriptive phrase by which our fathers designated a thorough 
education in the classics (to which we would gladly add also 
modern languages) and philosophy ; next, pure mathematics, 
and next, science. 

This ideal college course once mastered, the pot-metal has 
been made steel, fit for the miracle-working uses to which the 
university then really opens the door. Then, and not till then, 
is the time for the man in a hurry, who nevertheless wants a 
genuine liberal education, to consider how much farther and 
whither he will go. Then, and not till then, with disciplined 
mind and enlarged vision, he is competent to make his own 
choice from the " electives," decide in what direction his life is 
to turn and what further learning he will find of the most 
worth for his aim, whether that be profit, or the service of his 
fellow-men in politics or elsewhere, or merely pure intellectual 



20 UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES 

enjoyment. This collegiate course was the best basis for the 
higher learning the best systems of the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries had to offer. It is the best basis still, as we 
turn to the wider and better attainments the twentieth century 
has to offer. It has formed for generations of our race the 
badge of the best title any of the race has ever worn in any 
land, or can wear, — the proud title of scholar and gentleman. 

It is to the high duty of perpetuating and enlarging that ex- 
alted type we have the right to summon our institutions of the 
most advanced learning. We demand from them the combina- 
tion of exact knowledge and ripe reflection that makes the 
scholar; the combination of right thinking and right living 
that makes the gentleman. There you have the greatest possibil- 
ity of your colleges and universities, the consummate flower of 
your educational system, the inspiration and guide of progress, 
the safeguard of society, the ornament and defence of the 
Republic. 

We have lately seen the close of a century which in the splen- 
dor of its discoveries and the rapidity of its progress surpassed 
all that went before it. We stand at the dawn of a century that 
is to surpass it still more. The Republic closed the old century 
with a continental population of not far from eighty millions, 
and perhaps fifteen or sixteen millions more in its dependencies. 
The new century, before its close, may see that population, even 
if the ratio of increase be reduced to a third or fourth of the 
present average, rising to the almost incomprehensible number 
of three hundred millions. The Republic enters this new cen- 
tury with the control of the continent of the future, of the ocean 
of the future, and of the two richest archipelagoes of the world. 
It will pass no self-denying ordinance against growth. It faces 
the dazzling prospect with undazzled eyes, and scorns to shrink 
back from greatness through craven fear of being great. From 
insignificant beginnings it moved to the head of the material 
progress of the nineteenth century. Gentlemen and Scholars 
of Stanford, your field, and that of the American universities 
in general, is not merely material, but intellectual and moral. 
It is your task in the twentieth century to see to it that this 
Republic of our love and pride, whose world-wide extent and 
illimitable opportunities thus confuse the understanding and 
bewilder the imagination, shall respond not unworthily to the 
wider duties of its fortune, shall rise to preeminence in more 
than material progress, and march at the head of the culmin- 
ating civilization of the world. 



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